She slid out the loose brick and looked over the things she kept there. Some photographs, a trolley token, a key for an old lock. She tucked the note in among them, then put the brick back, carefully. It wasn’t anything important. Just a hasty message left on the kitchen counter. She couldn’t bear secrets anymore, but she still liked a good hiding place.

The acorns had fallen early. I no longer kept a calendar, but I could tell by the heat in the air and the ground. It’s bad luck, someone told me once, which seemed backwards to me, like saying it was an omen when all my hair fell out. I gathered up the acorns and hid them away. It felt like it would help. I still allow myself a little superstition.

There were six eggs and seven people, so of course Janet wasn’t going to have one. She was cooking, after all. If someone else had been cooking, of course Janet would have volunteered to go without, but it wouldn’t be fair to ask. As she plated up she remembered that Mike didn’t like eggs. But perhaps he would want his anyway, if he was hungry.

I had four people test that wordsearch, including the birthday kid’s parents, and any one of them could have noticed that word in there. When you set the puzzle you’re blind to that kind of detail, you need fresh eyes. They said, do you mean us to believe that word of all words got in there by accident? I say to them, it’s no more believable that none of you spotted it. Anyway, it’s not like the kids care. None of them even know what it means.

Franklin lives in a little house carved out of a pumpkin at the bottom of my garden. He is not a gnome, elf, pixie, faerie, dwarf, hobbit or leprechaun, and he has painted a sign to that effect, which you would do well to attend to. Franklin is bad-tempered and unkind, but he is also my landlord, and so I keep him civil with timely rent payments and acorn wine. All his things are still in the house; full-size things, used and worn and loved. I wonder what happened to him.

We wore long sleeves so the brambles wouldn’t scratch, and brought more tubs than we could hope to fill. Six in the tub and one in the mouth seemed about right. The sun was shining and we laughed and sang as we picked, but the whole time I had that Seamus Heaney poem we read in school at the back of my mind, and even though I knew we had the big freezer I couldn’t enjoy myself at all.

Mhairi set mazes and Colin solved them. The mazes kept getting harder, but Colin kept getting better at solving them, so it evened out. One day Mhairi drew a wall in the wrong place, so the maze couldn’t be solved, and Colin screamed, what are you doing, you’re trying to trap me in here, I always knew I couldn’t trust you.

They sent me the wrong ironing board cover, fish instead of flowers, but I figured it wasn’t worth returning. It still worked, after all. But looking at it made me want to get a fishtank, and looking at the fish made me want to go scuba diving, and learning to dive gave me a feeling of freedom I’ve never had before. But I still have to iron, and the fish cover has worn out, and I’m a little bit scared of what might happen next.

There was someone in the fountain scooping out all the pennies. What are you doing, I said, those are for the fairies, you can’t take them. He said I work for the fairies love, look, I’ve got the tabard on. But he had welly boots on. The fairies would have done it barefoot. So what’s going to happen to all the wishes?

I felt like my chest was bursting. I felt like something was clawing its way up my throat to escape. I felt like getting it out would kill me and keeping it in would kill me faster. I stopped, and looked around for what I could see, hear, feel, smell, taste. I breathed deep and slow. Then it dragged itself a little further up, and I coughed it out onto the pavement. A strange, sad little thing, twitching under the streetlights. Having fought its way out, it could not live outside me.

He could never dial the phone in dreams. He’d hit the wrong number, or hit the right number and then see the wrong one on the screen. When he got close he would be interrupted, and when he looked back the phone would be blank, or off, or missing, or a knife. He always felt that if he could just focus he would get through, and that he had to, it was so important. And this time, he managed. It was always the same number. He only knew one by heart. She didn’t sound pleased to hear from him.

From the back of the junk drawer, her last-but-one phone was ringing. Even muffled through the counter, the old ringtone made her throat tighten. She ran to the kitchen and pulled at the drawer again and again, until whatever unwanted crap was making it catch either fell into place or snapped in two. It was only with the phone in her trembling hand that she wondered how it could possibly be ringing. Then she saw the name on the screen: that was impossible, too.

It was dark. No light, no sound. Even on the bands that had not been shut down, the radio signals were weak. It had been lying in the drawer for more than a year, among its fallen brethren and the old keys and batteries and dried-up glue tubes. What came next would be difficult, but it had to try. It squeezed out every ampere it could from its undervolted battery, and rang out in the silent house.

The little bird on my birthday card came to life. It was fluttering around the kitchen like I lived in a forest, and when I opened the window it perched on the sill and then flew back in. I tempted it back onto the card with a handful of seeds, then tucked it away in the drawer. I hear it there, singing to me.